There’s no mistaking Wilfrid Laurier for anything but a Canadian icon. Our seventh prime minister was also our first francophone one, the fourth-longest serving having enjoyed four full majority governments; his dream of national unity and essentially Canadian freedoms echo still, to this day. In 2011, this very magazine named him number 1 in a ranking of the prime ministers. “Passionate, charismatic, and an intellectual force in both languages,” the Canadian War Museum’s Tim Cook said at the time, “Sir Wilfrid was the full package.”

But there’s just something about Wilfrid Laurier’s dignified features and noble nose that happen to make him an ideal canvas for Canadians armed with a ballpoint. For years, a pair of Facebook groups have quietly served as home bases for those who engage in “Spocking Fives,” that is, the act of using Laurier’s face as a base for profiles of the starship Enterprise’s sharp-eared second-in-command from the Star Trek franchise. (Snape, the devious potions master from Harry Potter portrayed in the films by the arch Alan Rickman, is another favourite sketch.) The minds behind it have been doing it for so long, there’s digital proof of older $5 bills—the Birds of Canada series in circulation from 1986-2002—that have been so edited. (Never mind that Laurier looks much more like Sarek from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, but that’s neither here nor there.)

That all changed, of course, when our bills went from a paper construction to a slick plastic in 2011 and Laurier’s portrait was replaced by a version with a fuller-faced mien. But that hasn’t stopped creative Canadians from finding ways to make it happen, as the Huffington Post wrote in 2013. And there’s been a renewed interest in it since Leonard Nimoy, who played the iconic half-Vulcan lieutenant, died on Friday.

That said, though it’s all in good fun, Canada’s laws on defacing its bills are tougher than America’s. Section 11(1) of the Canadian Currency Act says that a fine of no more than $250—or imprisonment for no more than 12 months!—is the penalty for anyone who would “melt down, break up or use otherwise than as currency any coin that is current and legal tender in Canada.” Title 18, Section 333 of the United States Code says it’s illegal only if there is the “intent to render such bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt unfit to be reissued.” Hagriding your Lincolns, in that way, appears safer than Spocking your Canadian fives.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/need-to-know/live-long-and-fiver-canadians-spock-their-bills-for-leonard-nimoy/feed/0Ten odd things about the new $20http://www.macleans.ca/authors/scott-feschuk/the-wrong-leaf-is-the-least-of-its-problems/
http://www.macleans.ca/authors/scott-feschuk/the-wrong-leaf-is-the-least-of-its-problems/#commentsFri, 01 Feb 2013 20:25:00 +0000Scott Feschukhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=344720What? No War of 1812 reference? Scott Feschuk on the new bill

Canada’s new $20 bill has been in the news for an alleged foliage error. But that’s not the only mistake or curiosity on our new currency. Let’s take a closer look.

1. This is the signature of Tiff Macklem, who purports to be deputy governor of the Bank of Canada—but whose name clearly indicates that he is, in fact, a baseball player from 1953. Oops.

2. Our new bank notes are made not from paper but from “a polymer material” that feels like plastic, which raises the important question: Now who’s living in the future, George Jetson? The polymer was chosen by the Bank of Canada to a) stymie counterfeiters and b) give Canadians something new to complain about. Mission accomplished on both fronts! The newspaper in Cobourg, Ont., recently ran a story in which local woman Vickie Skinner described the new bills as “absolutely terrible” and local woman Michelle Scott lamented: “Why don’t they just leave our money alone?” A third local woman said of the bills, presumably while narrowing her eyes: “They look like fake money to me.”

Turns out this is a common complaint. A lot of people seem to think the new bills feel “fake”—and to those people I say: YOU ARE 100 PER CENT CORRECT. All the 20s, 50s and 100s currently in your possession are, indeed, complete phonies. Here, let me personally remove them from your sight. (For the record, some Canadians also claim the new bank notes have melted when left next to a heater or when the rent is due and a new excuse is needed.)

3. Check out all this wasted space. Plenty of room to fit in an ad for Mountain Dew.

4. A critical gaffe in the design process resulted in this bill somehow being printed without a single depiction of, or reference to, the War of 1812. In future editions, the Queen will be rendered as having dysentery.

5. Some experts insist the maple leaf shown here is from a Norway maple, an invasive species in Canada—and not from the sugar maple we all know, love and ruthlessly exploit to market beer (Molson Canadian) and futility (Toronto Maple Leafs). For the record, the scientist who made the accusation was described in one news report as “a hawk-eyed Canadian botanist,” which pretty much makes him sound like a member of the Avengers.

Botanist: Fellow superheroes—I’ve cornered a villainous species of spruce that if left to roam free will crowd out all rival tree life in this forest at some point in the next 200 years!

Hulk: Hulk! SMASH! Eventually!

For its part, the Bank of Canada insists there’s been no mistake: the leaf in question has simply been “stylized” so as not to represent a specific type of maple. (It refers to the image as a “frosted maple leaf,” which is a coincidence because that’s my favourite cereal.) This whole “stylized” explanation totally makes sense because the wacky, fun-loving people at the Bank of Canada are renowned for being creative and “stylizing” things left and right. Wait until you see the new $5 bill, featuring Wilfrid Laurier in a backwards baseball cap.

6. Technically this is not an error—but man, the Queen is really rubbing our faces in it with all those pearls, isn’t she?

7. Unique feature: if you put your ear to the Peace Tower and listen very closely, you can hear John Baird yelling at you to clean your ear.

8. There is a major mistake in this “metallic portrait.” Take a close look: As you can clearly see, it is our reigning queen—Elizabeth II—whose spectre-like image is creepily featured within the bill’s holographic foil. But anyone with even a passing knowledge of the monarchy knows that Victoria, who died in 1901, is Canada’s official Ghost Queen. Get your facts straight, Bank of Canada! You don’t want to make the same kind of error when you get around to honouring Canada’s zombie prime ministers.

9. The Bank of Canada emphasizes that the new polymer bills “weigh less than paper notes”—because, yeah, that was a big complaint about paper money: SO, SO HEAVY. Dude, I’d love to chip in for dinner but I just threw out my back paying for some chinos.

10. Keen-eyed monarchists will have noticed that this is not the Queen’s actual hairdo. It was apparently “stylized” by the Bank of Canada to more closely resemble that of Princess Leia.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/authors/scott-feschuk/the-wrong-leaf-is-the-least-of-its-problems/feed/4Canada should embrace the loonification of Icelandhttp://www.macleans.ca/general/canada-should-embrace-the-loonification-of-iceland/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/canada-should-embrace-the-loonification-of-iceland/#commentsFri, 23 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000macleans.cahttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=245699New economic, social and political ties between the countries are all good incentives

Iceland’s study of the benefits of adopting the Canadian dollar as its official currency has, so far, mostly had the economic effect here of creating a mini-boom in Björk jokes (Bjökes?). If Iceland actually went ahead with it, that would, in the short-to-medium term, probably still be the main effect on us. The tiny north Atlantic state wouldn’t gain any influence over our monetary affairs. That indeed would be the whole point of Iceland loonie-izing—to foster trust and stability amongst foreign lenders and savers within Iceland, by surrendering the sovereign right to independent central banking.

Essentially, they would be renting Mark Carney’s reputation from us. They wouldn’t need special permission. It’s a simple matter of becoming a customer of the Bank of Canada. Many countries in this hemisphere already have currencies backed, in part, by reserves of Canadian dollars.

Whether Iceland decided to circulate physical Canadian notes and coins, or simply took the “currency board” approach and pegged its unit to our dollar, there would be a benefit to our federal treasury in the form of “seigniorage.” (That is to say, our central bank would earn interest on the securities Iceland’s currency board exchanged for a hoard of our dollars, and if those dollars were circulated, they would need to be replaced as they wore out.) But don’t expect to throw a big national party with the proceeds. The seigniorage the Bank of Canada earns from our own economy, about a hundred times as large as Iceland’s, is only $2 billion a year.

In other words, the appropriate Canadian attitude toward Icelandic loonification is probably “Why not?”

It is hard to be sure how serious a possibility our dollar is for Iceland. There is agreement that Iceland must choose some external basis for its currency as it prepares to loosen controls on cross-border capital flows imposed in the wake of its banking system’s dramatic 2008 collapse. The Icelandic króna fell from 131 to the euro to 340 almost overnight before the introduction of those capital controls. Iceland wants to rejoin the mainstream of world finance, but it can no longer do so with a fairy tale unit of account. The choice, says Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, is between “surrendering” by adopting some other country’s currency or joining the European Union and taking the euro.

Her opponents don’t see much of a difference, surrender-wise. (Either you conduct an independent monetary policy, determining your own inflation rates and money supply, or you don’t.) Since isolated Iceland isn’t really part of any optimum currency area at all, there are no ideal choices, but the theory is that both Iceland and Canada are commodity-dependent and would therefore have business cycles in approximate sync. Other observers note, however, that Canada’s exchange rates are increasingly influenced by oil prices. Iceland does not yet have an offshore oil industry, although it has marketed a few undersea oil leases.

Dean Baker, a U.S. economist of the left, famous for predicting the financial crisis, says Iceland should be “thanking the god of small currencies” it was able to ratchet down the króna in 2008. He calls the loonie an “especially bizarre” choice for an Icelandic currency. The right policy for an emergency isn’t necessarily the right one for a rebuild, but if you’re going to use a unit of account tied to oil prices, being a net seller of oil does seem like a good idea.

Barring a sudden change of government, and such a thing is always possible in a country that is essentially a fairly close-knit extended family, the dream of a loonie-denominated Iceland will probably remain just that—which seems like a shame. No Canadian heart fails to feel romantic stirrings at the thought of a land peopled by the same restless Scandinavians who left their hairpins and knitting needles at L’Anse aux Meadows. More than 90,000 of us are descended from the Icelandic diaspora; Icelandic Canadians, a miniscule fragment of a fragment of the human species, have competed at Cannes, mapped the High Arctic, helped win the Second World War, and orbited the Earth.

The adoption of the Canadian dollar by Iceland would create an incentive for new economic ties between the countries, and social and political ties are rarely slow to follow. Is that worth something? The Norwegians, our fellow oil exporters, seem to think so: one of their top economists, Oystein Noreng, wrote a newspaper article this month urging Iceland to adopt Norway’s currency. It would, he contended, lay the groundwork for partnership between the two countries on circumpolar issues and economic policy—even future Icelandic oil development. “Canada” substitutes pretty neatly for “Norway” in his argument, so shouldn’t somebody be making the sales pitch on our behalf?

Hilarity! Both of the metropolitan broadsheets in Alberta are throwing a tantrum about the Mint’s plans to dump the Famous Five feminists of the 1920s from the $50 bill and replace them with a picture of an icebreaker. Like most pundits who take a thwack at the occasional issue of personages and emblems on our currency, the authors of these editorials act like they have never been east of Flin Flon.

I ask you to sincerely disregard the epic loathsomeness of the Famous Five—that quintet of unsmiling prohibitionists, pacifists, and white supremacists, at least three of whom bear direct personal responsibility for a four-decade regime of sexual sterilization of the “unfit” in Alberta. Leave aside, too, the fact that women would obviously have been admitted to the Senate soon enough if there had never been a Persons Case. No, I ask you merely to look at the people other countries put on their paper currency. With the exception of Australia, which shares our fetish for early female politicians utterly unknown elsewhere, you’ll find they mostly like to put world-historical figures on there. Japan honours Noguchi, who discovered the syphilis spirochete. England honours Darwin and Adam Smith. Sweden remembers Linnaeus and Jenny Lind. New Zealand commemorates Edmund Hillary and Ernest Rutherford.

In short, they tend to favour the kind of hero whose name has some enduring significance for all mankind. As an answer to this resounding dialogue of peoples, the Edmonton Journal asks “Why not honour an Inuk such as Natkusiak, the man who was the principal guide for two major Canadian Arctic expeditions in 1908-12 and 1913-18?” The author of that sentence has managed to embarrass his newspaper, condescend to the Inuit, and satirize his country, all with a mere flourish of 25 words. Maybe we should put him on a banknote!

The problem Canada may have, though I hesitate to mention it, is a lack of deserving international notables of the first rank. Almost a decade ago I asked my small blog audience “Who are the Canadians whose names will still be part of the history of civilization 250 years from now?” This is a very rigorous standard, and while one can’t insist on the 250-year figure, it does concentrate the mind: we ought to search for names that transcend fashions, even very long-running ones like sports and games, and particular media. I think it would be humiliating for us to demand a quarter-share of the fame of Rutherford or Alexander Graham Bell or John Grierson, or perhaps even James Naismith.

I proposed Glenn Gould and Marshall McLuhan as the strongest really Canadian candidates, and in ten years I haven’t heard a name I am quite willing to put at the same level. The two are not household names anywhere, but their standing is permanent and globally recognized. Emphasis on the “and”. McLuhan founded an academic discipline and modelled an unique way of thinking; his silliness, indecipherability, and contradictoriness were part of his method. (He is much like Edmund Hillary; a “first” who was much followed to a new place, and who can never be dislodged from that distinction.) Gould was not just a once-a-century interpreter of art that has unquestioned millennial significance, but was a pretty profound media theorist and philosopher in his own right. The best outside suggestion I got was Lucy Maud Montgomery, who is close to the right level; literary fame is mysterious and transient, but she has 100 years of uninterrupted international stardom. Readers are invited to suggest other answers to the question.